At the Roots of the World Tree
by Erin C
Summary: After regaining their humanity, Velvet and Cornelius seek out her brother's grave. Written for The Handmaid for Yuletide 2012.


"Velvet, we have been searching a very long time. Are you certain that this is the place?" Cornelius asked, his voice hushed. Even as he doubted her, he could not escape the effects of this green and gold sanctuary, and that left Velvet all the more certain that her memory had not failed her. She smiled at him over her shoulder as she pushed aside a waterfall of flowering vines so that they might pass. His hose and tunic were all over burrs and snags, as if in regaining its former shape his body had lost all familiarity with the wild places they had called home for centuries upon centuries.

"Don't you see how the trees here have grown?" she asked. "Their trunks are as big around as houses, and their branches entwine like those in the forests of Ringford, so long ago."

"There are many such forests in this region," Cornelius said, "though perhaps not so many as there were before the city of Edgar expanded to its current size." A root like a curl of her mother's hair wound its way across their path; Velvet cleared it, but Cornelius did not. "I must say, there were advantages to navigating the woods as a Pooka and not as a man," he grumbled as she extended a hand to help him to his feet. "Portals, for one."

"Are there not also advantages to human shape?" Velvet teased him, brushing her lips against his and making him blush.

"I love you no matter your form." His hand joined with hers as once his paw had done. "But I wish my own were not so clumsy. You lived in the woods so many years before becoming a Pooka that you are more graceful here than in any room at court, but I'd grown used to beast legs that leap obstacles in a single bound."

As they moved forward, a crimson light glimmered between the leaves, and her fingers tightened around his. "Do you see it?" she asked, and his stride lengthened to match hers as she pulled him toward the massive knot of roots and foliage that enclosed that pulsating glow.

At close range the World Tree seemed impossibly immense, its gnarled trunk eclipsing the woods beyond and spiraling upward toward an amber and emerald ceiling that human eyes could not distinguish as individual leaves. They had sought it out once before when it was little more than a sapling, young and green and rising from the wreckage of Ringford Forest.

"Yggdrasil," Velvet whispered, and she laid her hand on a twisting rootlet with the girth of a mature oak, her eyes falling shut. Beneath her fingertips, the bark was rough and full of life. "You guard my brother well."

"He could not ask for a finer monument. And I should not have doubted you," Cornelius said, pulling his eyes from the tree's full height to peer into the darkness beneath it, and the crimson light within. "Should we have destroyed Riblam, do you think? So that its Phozons might have rejoined the earth?"

"Even if we were able to disentangle it, I do not think we could have done so without the Cauldron. But even in that form, it cannot be entirely apart from the earth, entwined as it is with the World Tree." As Pookas they had been like Riblam - life contained and held apart from the cycle of everything else that moved and breathed and died. Suddenly weary, she leaned into Cornelius and laid her cheek on his shoulder. "When the time is right, perhaps the roots will break it down. For now, let it remain, as a reminder. Of Ingway, and the girl he loved."

"Ingway? What kind of a name is that?" piped a small voice behind them. Velvet and Cornelius spun around to find themselves looking at a rather small and grubby child who was looking quite boldly right back at them. A girl, Velvet thought, from the clothes, though fashion changed so much from age to age that it was difficult to tell for certain.

"How did you get here, little one?" Velvet asked gently, kneeling so that her eyes were level with the girl's, which were a fathomless deep blue like Gwendolyn's. Almost everyone managed to remind Velvet of her little sister in one regard or another, even all these generations later.

"I followed you," she said promptly. "My parents told me not to come in here alone, so…" She studied Velvet and Cornelius more closely. "That's a pretty dress, with all that lace. You look like a prince and princess out of the stories," she said, eyes round as the Cauldron and almost as bright.

"And what stories are those?" Velvet asked with a smile, thinking of the girl who had given them back their final coin, and with it their humanity, in exchange for the end of their tale. That girl would have known Ingway's name, she thought with a pang.

"Oh, you know, stories," she said dismissively. "Like the ones about King Odin and the Fairy Queen."

"You aren't so terribly far off," Cornelius told her.

"Why's it glowing like that?" the girl asked, peering curiously into the depths beneath the tree.

"You don't know?" Velvet asked, a shadow falling over her heart. "Do they no longer tell stories of Yggdrasil?"

The little girl tried and failed to pronounce the word. "Is it fairies? Some people say there's fairies here, you know. That they live in the forest like little points of light."

"It's a very important place called the World Tree," Velvet said. Her heart was pounding as she laid a hand on the girl's shoulder. "You're right that it is the fairies' home. It's the final resting place of the last fairy to exist in Erion, and it forms the very roots of the world. It must always be protected and kept safe, or humanity - the earth itself - will be undone."

The girl's eyes were very big, and Cornelius said, "Velvet, you frighten her."

"I'm not scared!" the girl protested, her voice high and thin. Velvet glared at him, then softened, because he was right. The girl fell silent as she stood.

"Come," Cornelius said, holding out a hand. "We shall help you find your way back to your parents."

"So, who are you, anyway?" the girl asked as they wound their way over mossy rocks and wayward streams.

"No one of importance," Velvet said quietly.

"Well, my name's Griselda," she said, and Velvet smiled, because that name, at least, had made its way down through the ages.

By the time they reached young Griselda's house at the woods' outer edge, the sun had dipped in the sky and warmed in hue, and her parents were frantic with worry. They showered thanks upon Velvet and Cornelius and offered to put them up for the night even as they eyed the strangeness of their clothes, but just as Cornelius had become accustomed to the Pooka's physical form, Velvet had grown too used to living in caves and under green canopies to feel entirely comfortable in the homes of proper folk. Once, Velvet and Cornelius had lived and talked and toiled with Gwendolyn and Oswald, and their children, and their children's children, but somewhere or somewhen, between one generation and another, they truly had become the legendary furfolk that lived in the shadows. She ached to rejoin humanity in more than just form.

"Not everyone knows the stories so well as the girl who returned our final coin," Velvet told Cornelius as they drifted off into the woods. The shadows of the trees lengthened around them, the setting sun still glimmering through the leaves and turning dust motes to gold. "Must we be the guardians of knowledge even now? Once, my only thoughts were to prevent the world's ending. Now that we are no longer Pookas, we will age and die - and that is as it should be. But it also means that Erion's history could die with us, or survive only as song and story, or languish forgotten in an attic. Could people be that foolish again? Is fate a wheel? Do we approach the same point on the circle?"

Cornelius laid a finger against her lips. "Princess. I wanted to stay a Pooka - just the two of us, and our love, forever. But you reminded me that it is better to be part of the world again. If it turns toward Armageddon, we will discover the means to avert its destruction as you did once before. And they are not the only ones who can tell stories to their children."

"Cornelius…" Velvet whispered, and she drew herself up. "Yes, you're right. When we can no longer carry that burden, our children will do so in our place."

"It needn't be entirely a burden," he said, and fondly brushed a loop of hair back from her face. "Our story became so real to the girl in the attic that she called out to us and freed us from our Pooka shapes. When your mother still lived, did she not tell you stories of other times and places for you and Ingway to pretend yourselves into?"

Velvet smiled, albeit not without sadness, to recall her mother's stories of the king cloaked in stars who rescued a wayward princess from the battlefield. They had not known the truth in them until it was too late for their mother. But she and Cornelius had no need to cloak unhappy family secrets in the language of story. They could give the tale to their children entire, so that they would know its wonders and hardships both, and the preciousness of what they would protect.

"Nothing told is entirely forgotten," she said, feeling more certain. "We will leave fate to the future, in our children's hands and hearts."

"And we will leave them happiness," he said. "When we were young and human and silly in love, what gave you the most joy?"

Apparently he could still make her blush, to put her in mind of the days when they met in secret and hid from a scowling Ingway. That was a part of their story, too - holding each other between sunlight and shadow as life bloomed verdant all around them. "To run through the woods with your hand in mine."

Cornelius smiled. "Then come, let us run."

She took his hand, and on impulse, he took hold of her other hand as well and spun her, making her laugh again for what seemed like the first time in an age. That circle, at least, was complete.


End file.
